


so maybe i'm divine

by goodmorningrose



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hate to Love, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Summer Romance, john just wants ten to die but ten has already made a bid on their new house in the hills, mark lee will eat the rich, short chapters because i bore myself, taeyong is just babie, ten is a lifeguard at a country club, ten is a smart idiot, there will be more tags some day sure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-07-20 08:42:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19989286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmorningrose/pseuds/goodmorningrose
Summary: Ten works as a lifeguard at a country club. Johnny is the hot stranger that visits one summer. Taeyong and Mark provide divine intervention.





	1. romanticism is public enemy number one

1

The thing about working as a lifeguard at a country club is that it’s easy money.

It’s one of those mornings, clammy and heavy on the lungs, a subtle wind rushes past and through and over. In his neighbourhood, Ten is sure, the kids are setting up their inflatable swimming pools, the taste of rubber on their tongues. Every single patch of grass inhabitated by blue kiddie pool, the mums all sit around to gossip about the newest divorcee and the cliché of another cheating husband while covering their children in a dense layer of factor 50 sunscreen.

He expected that smell here. aloe vera and perfume.

There is no one. the giant swimming pool is completely empty. Ten adjusts the parasol sitting atop his lifeguard’s chair and sticks the buds further into his ear canal. The chocolate croissant in his hand is slowly melting away into a sticky, flaky mess of sugared pastry.

He’s been here for 3 months and he’s only ever seen three people in the swimming pool. Their arms wide outstretched in chanel swimsuits, expensive hair dos covered in rubber caps, lips pursed in a pretentious- no, maybe he’s projecting.

The truth is the only reason he took this job is because his friends badgered him into it. They had convinced him that working there would pay good money and more than enough eye candy. One of those two statements had come true so far.

But really the main thing he knows is that its hot. His hands are clammy at all times and the sweat rushes down his back like a salty waterfall. The leather (!) seat of the lifeguard’s chair sticks to his ass every single time he wants to get up and he leaves behind a fine imprint of the less delicate things in life.

At least he’s got this god damn chocolate croissant to drag his body through the long, sickly sweet day.

“Ten,” Taeyong had said “the only way you’re going to escape this town is by finding yourself a rich sugar daddy on the brink of death. This is perfect.”

“Yeah hyung.” A blunt hung from in between Mark’s lips, his hands busy playing an undoubtedly dumb phone game, “this is what I’ve been saying all along. Kill the bourgeoisie. Revolutions and shit.”

The sun was shining way too brightly onto the roof terrace of Mark’s house. His parents weren’t home, they never were really, always working to provide the young man with the best possible opportunities.

Where Taeyong was Ten’s best friend Mark was his little brother. They had grown up neighbours, Taeyong the only one with his own biological siblings. Everything Mark knew he learned from them. Mark was a hard worker, maybe a bit too hard. He was in every single school club, was his class president and had gotten nothing but straight A’s for two years in a row. Even this he had learned from Ten, he presumed, as he had seen the failure of his friend’s academics and had not wished to follow in his footsteps.

Ten ripped the funk cigarette away from Mark’s mouth, who sputtered in a daze, and popped it in his own. He breathed in deeper than necessary, kept the smoke swishing around in his lungs for just a moment too long before breathing it out, just long enough to feel something heavy form in his throat.

“Go study for your history finals instead of investing so much time into creating imaginary revolutionary scenarios, fucker.”

He dumped the blunt into the synthetic blades of grass and used his calves to lift himself off the ground before patting the dirt off his uniform slacks.  
Taeyong giggled at the look on Mark’s face and slapped him on the thigh, Mark came with a counter attack which resulted quickly in a play fight of pinched elbows and bitten earlobes.

Ten pulled his backpack up from the ground and turned on his heels with a heaved sigh.

“Where are you going now?!” Taeyong was still struggling to hold mark in a headlock. The sweat glistened on his cupid’s bone. The perfect target. When Taeyong walked into the room you wanted him. Gorgeous. Irresistible really. And the biggest softie Ten knew. He loved stuffed animals, volunteered at the local retirement home every single Sunday and still hadn’t had his first kiss. (“It needs to be special, Ten.” he said, his eyes trembling with something akin to melancholy but not quite. Ten had nodded. thought about the rough hands on his jaw at Jung Jaehyun’s Halloween party, laughed at the idea of Ever kissing Jung Jaehyun at all and continued on feeding Taeyong caramel popcorn.)

“I’m going for that fucking interview you asshats.”

Taeyong grinned in silent victory and sent Johnny an unreadable secret message through the glint of mischief in his eyes.

“Eat the rich, hyung! eat the rich!” Mark shouted from through Taeyong’s vicious hold on him, his voice erupting in a cloud of bubbles and pink glitter. Hopeful and young.

What he had hoped for was this:

He would arrive to the country club reeking of pot, still in his school uniform with a big dumb grin on his face. The interviewer would tell him that he just wasn’t the right fit for the job, and Ten would be able to return to his friends and tell them that fate just wasn’t on his side today. They would go on smoking pot on the rooftop and envisioning ways to consume the one percent.

Instead this happens:

The interviewer tells him he can start tomorrow and hands him a contract to sign, with on it a pretty looking pay per hour that would provide Ten and his group of misfit friend with enough money to go on a graduation vacation to Jeju the next summer. with it comes the promise of free pool entrance for four of his friends after five months of work.

Ten signs the damned contract.

That’s how he ended up here, in an empty country club on a late Friday afternoon. The same place where he’s spent most of his summer holiday, his feet propped up on the armrests of his chair and the calming tunes of a Hot Girl Summer playlist bouncing through his head.

Nothing happens. Until something does.


	2. jane austen rolls in her grave

The first time he sees him he thinks he might be Adonis. That or he’s gotten heat stroke from lazing about in the sun all day. Ten immediately sits up straight in his chair and lets the earphones fall out of his head.

He’s wearing blue swimming trunks that do an awful job at covering up his strong thighs (not that Ten is mad about it, mind you). His hair is brown and free of product, falls beautifully over his face, some strands just hit the tops of his perfectly groomed eyebrows.

He starts to take off his shirt. Ten revvs up. Gets disgustingly and embarrassingly excited about the pre-emptive thought of bare, chiselled muscle and isn’t disappointed with what he gets. Now he’s sure this man is Adonis.

As he dives into the pool, all outstretched arms and Chanel swimming trunks, Ten follows the lines of his body. How he hits the water perfectly at a speed unparalleled. his strong, broad shoulders peek up from just underneath the crystal-clear blue water.

Ten decides that if this stranger is Adonis then he must be Aphrodite. Yes, he thinks, it finally all makes sense. They are brought together here on this hot summer’s day in this horrifically tacky country club by a strong force, divine intervention, some might say.  
He has to tell Taeyong and Mark about this immediately. Maybe they weren’t All useless by forcing him to go to that interview, maybe they had simply been part of God’s plan and now Ten was finally being rewarded for raising Mark Lee and the rest of the neighbourhood kids into good men and women that would be a meaningful part of society.

“Hey!” A strong and deep voice rises from the chlorine filled water, Ten is cruelly pulled from his romantic fantasy of marrying this man and settling down in the hills with three cats and maybe a dog- if the man insisted. You can’t have everything you want, relationships are a give and take, right? He would have to make some compromises, but Ten was willing to make them to get to caress those muscles and to suck tha-

“Hey!”

Ten looks up at the person interrupting his fantasy and points a finger at himself as if to question who the man is talking to.

“Yes, you! Who else would I be talking to?”

Ten looks around and must confess that the mermaid man in his pool has a point, though a weak one.

“Can I-“ he adjusts his parasol and takes a large sip of a virgin pineapple cocktail “help you?”

The man huffs loudly and plunges his fists down beside him, the sound of a splash follows. Oh, he’s glaring now. that probably isn’t a good thing.

“I could’ve drowned just now, you know that?!”

Ten scrunches his brows together and counts to ten in five seconds.

He’s a perfectly good swimmer. Ten watched him dive into the water like he was a professional, had seen his impressive breaststroke before he got distracted.

“You’re a perfectly good swimmer. I watched you dive. You know the breaststroke.”

The man gets up onto the silver ladder and pulls himself out of the pool just using his biceps- God those biceps- what Ten wouldn’t do…

He’s gotten up out of the water now and has wrapped one of the complementary blue towels around his body, he shakes the water out of his hair. “That’s a lot of assumptions for someone who only just saw me jump into the water. What if it was just an act? What if I was having a stroke? What were you going to do then, huh?” His voice sounds stern. Hot.

“I’m pretty sure that you wouldn’t have drowned in the five seconds I was taking to imagine our future married life together.”

“What did you say?”

Ten messes with the band of his sandal. “I was imagining our married life together.”

The man scoffs, slips his feet into his flip flops and marches away, the sound of wet plastic hitting stone following him into the distance.

“I swear he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen.”

Ten uses his hand to push the hammock he’s laying in back and forth lazily.

“His whole entire face was just screaming for my attention, hyung. He was calling to me. You know how whales do that whole echo-something thing?”

“Echolocation.” Mark fills in. All while marking important sections in his biology book. Goddamn Mark Lee and his smart fucking mind.

“Yeah, echolocation, sure. Anyway he was doing that to me like a merman prince and I’m going to marry him.”

Taeyong stuffs a roll of kimbap into his mouth and chews it sloppily, his mouth still slightly open as he does so. There is mayo left over on the corners of his lips.

“You said he hated you.”

Ten pulls up the corner of his own lip at Taeyong speaking with his mouth full, but he knows by now that the only thing Taeyong will do if he comments on it is open his mouth further.

“Yes. But it’s like that one movie with the zombies, right?”

Mark flicks a page in his book, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, hyung. And you’ve never even watched that movie, only the normal Pride and Prejudice.”

“You’re quite right Mark, I had to imagine those zombies to get through that absolute bore of a cinematic piece.” He flicks a piece of paper Mark’s way, he doesn’t react. “Anyway. It’s hate to love. It’s what all the cool kids are doing right now. The sexual tension will keep building until it just explodes into a night of hot passion in one of the changing cubicles.”

“You’re gonna spend a whole night in one of those claustrophobic death traps?”

“It was a hypothetical sexy situation, hyung!”

“If chlorine and athlete’s foot sounds sexy to you, sure.”

Mark closes his biology textbook with a loud slam and looks up at his two older friends through his lashes. Ten just pushes the hammock again and Taeyong shoves some instant spicy rice cakes into his gullet.

“Are we distracting you, Marky-kins?” Taeyong asks as always through a mouth full of food. Ten wonders for a second how wide he can open his jaw and imagines him as a snake swallowing a whole antelope or something. He’s got to stop watching nature documentaries on Youtube in his spare time.

“Mark it’s summer vacation. Put the textbooks down for at least One day.” Ten knows that it isn’t that easy for Mark. That in every place where Ten hopes for The Lord himself to come down from the heavens and set him straight Mark decides to be a hard worker, to fight for his place in the world, that he hopes to become a doctor and make his parents proud, to provide them with the most comfortable life he can give them.

Mark groans and fishes a notebook from his desk drawer. He scribbles something on the front in big chicken scratch letters before turning the notebook towards his friends.

“OPERATION SUMMER ROMANCE & ZOMBIES”


	3. The Ikea Incentive

3

“The first step is simple.” Mark says 2 days later as he and Ten sit at the window of the convenience store. Taeyong pops up from behind one of the shelves he was stacking holding a can of tomato soup in his strangely elegant hand, his left eyebrow raised indignantly, “You always say things are simple, Mark Lee.”

Taeyong has a point, Ten can’t deny this. Where Taeyong and Ten had struggled through high school and were still struggling to this day, Mark travelled at a leisurely pace, stopping every once in a while, to enjoy the views.

“I’m serious this time! Even an idiot-“ he looks at Ten pointedly “-even an Idiot could do this.”

Ten takes a large bite of the cheapest spicy ramen and immediately feels his sinuses clear. If only these spices would clear the thoughts of Stranger Cock from his impressionable mind.

“The first step is easy. Dress to impress.”

Around 3 hours later Ten is back in his lifeguard’s chair. His legs are silky smooth and his eyebrows finely plucked through the courtesy of Nakamoto Yuta’s mom, who owns a waxing studio in town, and his skin is glistening with a tanning oil that The Devil a.k.a Jung Jaehyun still had left over from his own last desperate attempt to get the man of his dreams to notice his presence (he had failed miserably, good for him).

Look, any other day Ten would say fuck you and your beauty standards. He’s a confident, independent, gay man and he has no need to prove himself to anyone. Shaving is a ploy created by the government to keep our society in check and specially to suppress women in their ability to express themselves in ways they themselves believe to be satisfactory, and waxing was only created in an attempt to compete with the continuously growing razor indust-

But if he’s honest, he just would do anything for dick right now. He’s dick-deprived, touch-starved he is nothing but an empty husk of a man whose whole life surrounds his two best friends and their dumb ass gimmicks. Mark Lee has worn his T-Shirt inside out 3 times this week alone and Taeyong still doesn’t know that he, scientifically speaking, Is the most beautiful man alive. Where did those two even find the courage to give _him_ life advice? They are a mess, a beautiful one, but a mess nonetheless.

He turns on his “hot girl summer” playlist, strangely the first song that bursts through the tiny speaker precariously balanced on the arm rest of his tall lifeguard’s chair is “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. The original Hot Girl he presumes. He hopes to get through this with the power of Megan Thee Stallion and Paul McCartney on his side.

This time, he hears him before he sees him. One of his earphones is subtly poking out of his ear, in such a fashion that he can mould his body into a very fashionable position at ultra-high speed when he hears the familiar sound of his voice. Ah, it feels like summer breeze, it sounds like baby birds cracking out of their shells, the mellow hums of long forgotten show-tunes-, oh. He’s yelling.

“Did I not tell you I wanted him gone?” the volume of his voice has increased dramatically, Ten shakes the leftover earphones out of his ear and stills his breathing, stops chewing the cherry flavoured gum between his molars, trying to hear every single word that’s being said.

“Sir-“

“Don’t Sir me. I told you to fire him yesterday.”

“Mister Seo, he is a dearly appreciated employee of your father’s and- “

Something low grumbles in Ten’s stomach, realization, or that bargain spicy ramen he shoved into his digestive system earlier that morning. No, definitely realization.

“Forget it.” The man, who Ten can now at least refer to as “Seo” replies. He steps out of the way from the oddly green bushes that were hiding him from view and through the prim and proper gate closing the pool area off from the rest of the club. Ten crosses his legs over one of the chair’s armrests and lets his sunglasses fall over his nose with a flick of his neck.

“So,” he says as the man just about reaches his very high chair, “your daddy owns the place.”

Ten looks at Seo as subtly as he can, just from under the leg of his glasses. He is looking at the floor, his shoulders risen high above his neck, and shaking his head.

“I hear you are an ‘appreciated’ employee.”

Ten chews on his gum, slides the sunglasses further over his nose so they are practically useless, just how he likes them.

“Indeed, Mister Seo and I go way back.”

Junior Seo starts laughing, a deep and roaring one that comes straight from his belly. It sounds a bit like thunderstorms do, Ten decides.

“I get it now. Why you’re here.” He raises his head in Ten’s direction and looks him straight on in the eyes, a bit of a diabolical smirk stretched over his small face.

Does he get it? Ten wonders. Does he get that Ten just wants to make his friends happy, does he get that all Ten wants is to be a semi-productive member of society, as all people do? Does he get that his parents give him enough to live of off and nothing more. That they don’t want to be associated with him if they can avoid it?

Ten doesn’t think so, not when he looks at the way his lips pull over his teeth, or the angry furrow in his brow. Not when he looks at the Rolex on his wrist and the easy sweep of his brown hair. He looks like he has never taken a bite of on sale instant rice in his life.

Junior Seo turns on the back of his heel, shooting daggers at Ten from the back of his head, and leaved the life guard sitting there. One-One.

“What did you say?!” Mark Lee is holding a marker tightly onto a page of summaries, letting the ink bleed out. Taeyong’s head is buried in a pillow as he cackles his pretty little face off.

“I said, ‘indeed, Mister Seo and I go way back’.” Taeyong takes his head from out of the pink cushion to take a heaping breath.

“Are you an idiot?!!”

“Look, how could _I_ have known Junior Seo would make that out to sound like I am fucking his dad?”

Mark sighs loudly and drops his head into his book, “I made you a 10-step plan, I made you a fucking spreadsheet. Nowhere in there did it say to tell him you fucked his dad. No matter who his dad was.”

Ten leans his fingers on each other, ‘’to be honest, step 5 was ‘show off your charms’ and I think I did pretty well in that department.”

There is a tremor in Mark’s fingers as he taps his desk and proceeds to lean his forehead on his hands.

“What charm?” Taeyong asks, “fucking old rich men?”

“Okay Mister Still Hasn’t Fucked Jung Jaehyun. And no, actually I helped Mister Seo assemble some Ikea furniture once. It was an emergency.”

Mark sighs, oh does he sigh, “an Ikea furniture-based emergency?”

“Yes, Mark, the man just really needed his Billy Bookcase assembled. Any other questions?”

Taeyong raises his hand, “Yes, Lee Taeyong go ahead.”

“If I were to desperately want to unfriend you, where would I acquire the appropriate forms for such an action?”

Ten throws a pillow directly at his beautiful face.


End file.
